Category Archives for Commentary.
The CDC is announcing today that fully vaccinated people should wear masks again in indoor public settings, because of spread of the Delta variant. People aren’t going to comply. However this change makes an extension of the federal transportation mask mandate more likely.
Travelers are banned from entering the U.S. if in the prior 14 days they’ve been in China, Iran, the European Schengen area, U.K. and Ireland, Brazil, South Africa or India. That’s true even though the U.S. requires testing of everyone entering by air; if the traveler has had a full course of an mRNA vaccine; and is coming from a place with far less Covid-19 than the U.S.
This makes no sense. Americans can go to Europe and they can return – in some cases even if they’re unvaccinated. But vaccinated Europeans can’t fly to the U.S. And this is somehow for our protection?
Provided an employer is financially solid enough to make the payments, and processes expense reimbursements quickly, there’s few things better than being able to charge business expenses to your personal credit card. This makes it easy to earn initial card bonuses, as well as threshold bonuses that might help you keep elite status, and ultimately generates lots of points for you to use later. Imagine being able to charge plenty of airline tickets (at 5x) and conferences at hotels (3x) in large volumes!
But there are several big “if’s.”
With the Biden Administration taking aim at ratcheting up competition regulations across the economy, the airline industry’s lobby shop came out with a claim that the industry is already highly competitive. Some of their arguments are true and fair, others are misleading, and they skip over the role that government plays protecting big incumbent airlines from competition that might drive them to improve their products.
Here most places have re-opened. There’s an expectation that many businesses will return to the office in the fall. Schools are expected to be open. Already leisure travel has returned to pre-pandemic levels, and in some places has exceeded it. But is this state of affairs going to last?
When leisure travel tapers in the fall it won’t yet be replaced by business travel. And spread of the Delta variant amongst unvaccinated populations without immunity from prior infection could lead to real challenges for the industry.
New Yorkers thought that when the city capped the number of licenses for for-hire vehicles ‘to prevent traffic congestion’ they were regulating Uber. The truth is they were doing Uber’s bidding by handing the ridesharing giant a tool to keep out competitors.
In New York there are a limited number of licenses, and those are busy working for Uber. New competitors have a hard time entering the market. Startup Revel thought they found a loophole that would allow them to compete against Uber in New York. But they were shut down by regulators in a bizarre process.
My award booking partner Steve Belkin has a new book out, Mileage Maniac, which any frequent flyer or mileage junkie will get real enjoyment from.
President Biden announced the nomination of Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger to the ambassador-level position of U.S. representative to ICAO, International Civil Aviation Organization. Sullenberger is best known, of course, as the pilot of US Airways flight 1549 which went down in a ditching in the Hudson River after a double bird strike.
A Republican for most of his life, he switched his voting registration to Democrat in 2019. He endorsed Joe Biden for President in February 2020. This past fall he created a commercial with the Lincoln Project tying his experience with US Airways 1549 to his opposition to Donald Trump’s re-election.
To fly from the U.K. to Ireland you need a negative PCR Covid-19 test. One woman, a U.K. health care worker, was denied boarding for her flight from Birmingham to Dublin despite having a negative PCR test.
The government doesn’t accept her test, because it was provided by the government – even though it isn’t one of the tests listed as unacceptable. Fortunately there was a workaround to add an enroute stop and avoid the non-sensical requirement.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is hitting back at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s placing his country’s air safety rating under review, with expectations of a downgrade, and the implications for limiting new flights to the U.S. by Mexican airlines and placing constraints on the ability of U.S. airlines to codeshare with Mexican carriers.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
